Recovery from addition requires a lot of self-reflection. Recovery dictates we examine our past behaviors, instincts, and our character. The point of taking our own inventory isn’t to cause ourselves additional pain, anguish, or shame. It is to allow us to find the driving factors in our character that make us susceptible to addictive impulses.
When the time came for me to engage in the process of self-inventory, I entered with the naïve belief I’d be done in an hour or two. I mistakenly thought so because I thought of myself as an overall pretty good guy who just happened to drink a lot. When I spent a little time thinking about it, I realized I was a person who also lied a lot about drinking. I lied about how much I was drinking. I lied about when I was drinking. I lied about whether I had been drinking. So, I discovered some dishonesty waiting for me under my self-reflective lens.
I dug deeper. I considered the mentality it would require for me to place my need to drink above the truth. Why it could be that I thought it more important to drink than to share myself and my life with my friends and family. I considered the mental energy and financial resources that were consumed by my drinking, let alone my time. I considered the loss of companionship those who cared about me had to deal with when I was drinking. Both in my absence, and in my intoxicated presence, I was depriving them of a loved one. I found selfishness and self-centeredness when I took a long look inward.
I questioned my motivations. I found that I treated myself as the main character in my life and even the people closest to me had been relegated to something else. I was Player 1 in a world of NPCs. I found a lack of my own personal empathy when I really got down to it.
I could go on. This, unfortunately, doesn’t exhaustively describe the cornucopia of vices I found when I had the gumption to start chronicling them. But, Dear Reader, I’ll pivot to the point. It was only because I turned a critical eye inward that I was able to identify the defects of character that were really holding me back and making a life of addiction both possible and essential. I believed and still do that it would be the conscientious eradication of these base tendencies that would allow me to undergo the psychic change I’d need to recover from active addiction.
Turning to Seneca’s quotation above, then, we must realize that it is neither essential or productive that we engage in identifying and chronicling the faults we might observe in others. Stated another way, we “don’t take someone else’s inventory” and we “keep our side of the street clean.”
We can always, if we are looking for it, find someone who is behaving in a way we disapprove. That doesn’t make us improve, though. Pointing out someone’s lie doesn’t make me honest. Identifying someone else’s greed doesn’t make me charitable. It is only in refining our character that we get better, not in pointing out the flaws of others. That attention has to be turned inward to inspire us to change.
I frequently do observe people in sobriety who display behaviors I don’t particularly agree with. I have made it my practice to resist the impulse to correct them. That’s not my place. I do register that, sometimes, by thinking to myself, “I don’t want that for myself,” and then I move on. This certainly isn’t to say that I have always behaved perfectly, even in sobriety. I haven’t. My own faults are enough to keep me busy, so I occupy myself with them and if I can offer anything to anyone else, it has to be by living example. People do not generally respond well to being reprimanded by a stranger, so I’ll keep myself busy with the person I can control and leave the rest be.
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